Skull Carved of Meteorite
At the AGTA show, Nature’s Geometry (Tucson) had on display a life-sized skull carved of meteorite (see above). The skull, “Gaia,” was a collaboration between Lee Downey of Artifactual Studios (Tucson and Bali, Indonesia) and Balinese artist Ida Bagus Alit. It was carved from two pieces of the Gibeon iron meteorite, which landed in prehistoric times after bursting into pieces upon coming through the atmosphere. Its fragments are scattered over a large area in Namibia. Based on radiometric dating, the meteorite is estimated to be around four billion years old. Long before Westerners documented it in the early 1800s, the Nama people used pieces of it as weapons and tools.
Downey and Alit worked on the carving from March 2015 to January 2020 in the workshop Downey shares with Ratu Pedanda Manuaba, a high priest of Bali. In Balinese culture, meteorites are seen as powerful, and meteorite iron is used to make traditional keris (daggers) for ceremonial use.
The Gibeon meteorite’s makeup is about 90% iron and 8% nickel, with small amounts of cobalt and phosphorus. Downey said the material is somewhat soft and sticky. The critical aspects were maintaining the proportions and watching for potential imperfections in the material. “Cracks and pockets of odd space junk can pop up,” he said. “Luckily Gaia was basically flawless. She was difficult but forgiving.”
The work was done using hacksaws, steel grinders, and rotary carving setups. Protective gear was required when using cutting burrs because the tiny shards coming off the skull were “like little razor blades flying around.” Based on models of the human skull, a sphere-shaped piece of the meteorite was carved for the upper cranium and a block for the jaw, which is articulated and removable. Roughly 159 lbs. (72 kg) of material were cut and ground away to form the 39 lb. (18 kg) skull. After carving, the skull was fully polished to a chrome-like finish.
The final step was etching with a weak acid to reveal the meteorite’s fine octahedrite structure, visible in the pattern on the skull’s surface. The pattern, known as a Widmanstätten pattern or Thomson structure, is composed of interwoven bands of kamacite and taenite (iron-nickel alloys) and develops over millions of years of very slow cooling. It is revealed only through cutting, polishing, and etching.
The brown line on top of the skull is an inclusion of tridymite, a silica polymorph. Tridymite is also found on Earth, the moon, and Mars, and in planet-forming disks of dust and gas around stars.
Downey has previously described the human skull as “undeniably sure to register emotions in all of us. It has all the fear of death, the reminder of being alive, and the possibility of something greater in store…out there in the mysterious beyond.”
“The intense gravity of this extraterrestrial metal is itself a mystery of life,” he said. “Four billion years old and counting, the long travel to arrive on Earth, the rare beauty of the crystal patterns that can only form in the vacuum of space. The symmetry of the entire tale is beyond human comprehension.”
